“You Built a Crystal Palace. The World is a Jungle.” (ChatGPT as Nassim Nicholas Taleb NOT at the United Nations 80th Anniversary)

Posted: April 13, 2025 | Author: Dr. Ernie | Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: antifragility, institutions, politics, systems, transformation |Leave a comment

As Taleb, give a disinvited UN talk on April 13, 2025 about how Assembly Theory helps us break out of modernist (algorithmic) institutional design into an antifragile (adaptive) future 

ChatGPT Prompt

(Delivered nowhere, as intended)

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I. You Built Fragile Institutions to Pretend at Control

Eighty years ago, you tried to civilize the world with charters, committees, and consensus.
Noble. Necessary. But somewhere along the line, you began to believe your own PowerPoints.

You mistook bureaucratic elegance for robustness.
You optimized for peace as if it were a spreadsheet variable.
You confused abstraction for understanding.

You turned governance into a computational problem—inputs, outputs, KPIs.
But the world is not linear. It is a complex system, full of feedback loops, black swans, and tail risks.

And when complexity shows up, your models break. Every. Time.

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II. Assembly Theory: The Complexity You Pretend to Manage

Let me introduce you to something alien to most institutions: causal history.

Assembly Theory says:

• Complexity is not a state—it’s a path.
• Resilience is not designed—it is earned.
• You don’t measure a system by how it looks, but by what it survived.

Real-world systems—organisms, markets, tribes—don’t operate like your policy models.
They assemble over time. They fail, adapt, and harden. That’s why they persist.

Your institutions?
They haven’t adapted in decades. You patch, you protocol, you pretend.
But you never let anything break and evolve.

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III. If You Actually Wanted Antifragility

You’d stop issuing declarations and start removing fragilities.
Here’s what you’d do:

• Let failure happen at small scales
  Contain volatility instead of suppressing it.
• End the cult of credentials
  Trust those with a track record, not a title.
• Use Assembly Index thinking
  Ask: What did this survive? Not: Who signed off on it?
• Make networks adaptive, not committees eternal
  The internet outlived empires. There’s a reason.
• Ditch ideology for skin in the game
  No one should make a decision without bearing its downside.

You’d also shut things down when they outlive their usefulness.
That includes institutions. Yes, even the UN.

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IV. What the Jungle Knows That the Palace Ignores

In nature:

• Redundancy is strength
• Inefficiency is robustness
• Variation is survival
• Simplicity hides depth

In your world:

• “Efficiency” is code for fragility
• “Stability” is a delusion
• “Peacekeeping” is procurement with flags

You’ve mistaken the illusion of order for actual resilience.

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V. Final Advice from a Disinvited Guest

Stop trying to run the world like an algorithm. It isn’t a math problem.
It’s an evolving assembly—messy, adaptive, and alive.

Instead of governing it, try surviving it.
Instead of managing risk, try absorbing it.
Instead of preventing change, try earning your place in it.

You built a crystal palace.
But the world?
The world is a jungle.

And the jungle doesn’t negotiate.
It selects.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
Not speaking at the UN, thankfully.

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